Five years before Waheeda Baloch stood on Bagh Ibne Qasim’s Katrak Band Stand as curator of the Fourth Karachi Biennale (KB24)—with the sun setting before her, and the biennale beginning¾ she was a participating artist at the same location, for KB19. Dressed in black with fruits scattered around, ‘Aab e Hayat’ saw her in a ritualistic act, evoking Karachi’s ecological crisis and encroachments by economic development. Baloch feels a duty towards speaking the truth, to expose. In 2017, sitting at a desk by a library, she slashed and blackened out texts in a comment on power over narrative, in her performance titled Repertoire for the first biennale. Now as the first woman curator of KB24 she, unsurprisingly, lurches us into unsettling spaces. Spread across five venues, the 30 projects sound the alarm. A beautifully crafted thematic—Rizk/Risk: food futures and fair practices, plays on the delicate balance between sustenance (rizq) and the risks that threaten it¹.

Food has an identity beyond nourishment. On the internet it is more beloved than sports, and trails behind films and music as the fourth-most popular subject². It is a weapon in war, golden goose, repository of knowledge, tool of control, contaminator of the environment and vault for resistance, and KB24 opens food’s many doors.

Moroccan duo Salim Byari and Ghita Skali fill a corner of Sambara Art Gallery with sacks and strings of sunflower seeds, 2000 kilograms of them, inviting visitors to munch and reflect on the replacement of food crops with more hip cash crops, in Sunflower Seed project; nearby, Paloma Ayala offers a seething and desperate look at the loss of her agriculturist family’s land and traditions on the Mexico-Texas border, in  Que no me quiten ni la lengua ni las patas (Take anything but my tongue and feet). Works offered insights into indigenous wisdom, foregrounding women’s roles as keepers of traditional knowledge: Sepideh Rahaa’s video installation Song to Earth, Song to Seeds draws parallels between rice cultivation and birthing a child, where families in Northern Iran blanket the seeds in herbs to keep them warm, and sing to them, in an unfair world where sanctions compel the use of toxic fertilizers. Anusha Khawajah Shahid’s (KB24 EBM Emerging Artist Prize winner) Hawah’s Garden: Threads of Nature uses the charpai bed woven by women as an exploration of community and tradition.

Artist Mahreen Zuberi deconstructs a sweetmeat with gram flour and sugar, referencing mannat (divine intervention) for rizq, and rituals around Hazrat Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s shrine in the elegant In Proportions. Enora Lalet’s mysterious ‘Vanishing Creature’ served audiences edibles from a face mask created like a platter of food.

Peruvian Daniella Zambrano Almidon cooked and shared Pachamanca, a dish of potatoes, meat and vegetables in Colonial History of the Potato examining dispossession and memory, Tamasha Collective create a mela like atmosphere, serving kulfi and paan in Glorious Hotel. The Table—Mahigeer aur Hum, a form fashioned from reclaimed wood from fishing boats, had artists Fazal Rizvi, Ahmer Naqvi, Luluwa Lokhandwala, Shabbir Mohammed and Fatima Majeed (an activist from the Mahigeer community), used food and recipes as a ‘diving board to talk about erasures, displacements, and oppressions³’. Visitors were invited to gather, share food memories from the kitchens of the fishing communities, and even eat ‘jhinga pulao’ in a jubilant display.

The Biennale asks, can there be global food security, amidst an active preservation of the environment and cultural heritage, and sustained social justice? It is a gigantic, difficult question. If you are looking for an escape, KB24 does not provide it, it wants you to stay right here, staring reality in the face. Here are bowls of blood, as you alight the stairs of Frere Hall in Ayesha Jatoi’s evocation of the Gaza war in Flesh & Blood, a Nofood Cookbook for times of war, corruption and genocide by Karolina Brzuzan. Here is the story of climate change on Punjab’s fields in Asif Khan’s Once Upon a Landscape, the ecological and food crisis faced by residents of Morko Valley in Gilgit Baltistan in Khushboo’s Fading Heaven. Farida Batool’s haunting Daney Pe Likha Hai-among KB24’s most stunning—makes you feel you are witnessing yesterday and this instant. A sculpture of a wheatfield fashioned from barbed wire evokes a battleground, while its shadows form stalks like the ghosts of destroyed fields and homes.

An accompanying video has the artist’s face juxtaposed with Gaza war footage and media coverage; Kamala Harris’ voice defiantly offering Israel support is overlaid with images of dead children and the anguished words of victims ‘my darling’. We are made aware of what the earth can yield, and how much we can brutalise it, shots of lush fields transform to bombing sites, rubble and military might. There is a sense of the world being backwards, embodied by the iron ‘wheat stalks’ that simultaneously resemble food and barricades.

In a year with global art exhibitions altered or taken down completely for pro-Palestine mentions⁴, KB24’s highlighting of the Gaza war was refreshing. The collateral exhibition, ‘Artists of Gaza Live in Our Heart’ was front and centre in the Biennale’s largest venue, with works on fabric by 11 art institutes from around Pakistan.

Dedicated to the courageous artists and people of Gaza, the works were suspended joyously under the Lady Lloyd Pier at Bagh Ibne Qasim. Receiving the most outstanding work award, The Textile Institute of Pakistan’s collaborative tapestry had a touching and disturbing surface with thread, fabric, keys and keffiyeh patterns to embody “the narrative of Palestinian resilience through textile art.”

KB24 succeeded where there was detail and looseness, like the PAWPE (Pakistan Association of Women Publishers and Editors) pop-up reading room under Lady Lloyd Pier, with its bright and inviting books and cushions.

Amongst the sounds of the park and hints of sea breeze, there were the verses of young poets, or sessions with Mehvash Amin and Muneeza Shamsie, or Attiya Dawood, Qamar Bana and Tapu Javeri sharing their publications and Karachi of the past. The inclusion of the mahigeer (fisherfolk) community of Karachi’s coastal belt, with events like “a Fisherfolk’s courtyard” provided space for an indigenous group that was pushed to the margins, but “never went away⁵.” In another first, a multilingual mushaira with well-known poets introduced younger audiences to this poetic tradition.

A quiet motif from the biennale, is the bright corn from Muge Yilmaz’s (an artist who grows 300 varieties of maize) Three Hundred Sisters, their colours far removed from the Western approved yellow. In a discursive session, “Wisdom Conversations—a hybrid seminar on water” photographer Rafael Viledo showed a 108-year-old woman of Sao Paulo’s indigenous Guaranis-mbyá. Sidelined by urbanization, they owe their longevity to cultivating their own food—like corn the colour of amethysts and rubies. This celebration of indigenous wisdom offers a ‘key to healing the land’⁶ and ourselves.

Sadqain Riaz’s Water Spill and Nala had coloured dyes seeping into slabs of cement, forming evolving paintings. As the biennale progressed, the work’s yellows and greens were chased by a sinister grey. In his daily commute the artist would cross the ‘dying’ river Ravi and saw its transformation into a ‘ganda nalla.’

In the piece, troughs of water line the ground, with dye dripping like the ticking of a clock. Using beauty Riaz broaches the disappearance of our rivers and the toxicity of our water systems by unchecked industries.

Discursive sessions like Emilia Terraciano’s The Image Starved on the Bengal Famine of 1940 (which inspired Zainul Abedin’s iconic drawings), and Food for Thought, Thought for Change’: Rasheed Araeen’s Practice of Transformation by Dr Kylie Gilchrist, dovetailed the art. Termed a ‘forgotten Holocaust’ Bengal’s man-made colonial famine at the time of WWII, led to the loss of an estimated 4-5 million lives. Terraciano shared images of victims with “ribs like rafters of a dilapidated shed” being forced to pose for the photographer, or human remains arranged in an S shape for better impact. Gilchrist explored food’s role in Araeen’s seventy year-long practice, including his 1986 Venice Biennale proposal for a ‘participation/installation work’ in which collected bones will be used to feed visitors risotto or pulao, and the subsequent waste turned into sculptures. The Archival Project Presentations on Gender, History, Preservation, a collaboration between PAPWE (the Pakistan Association of Women Publishers and Editors) and Teesside University, had four researchers archive publications run by women.

Lahore based Hira Azmat worked on material from Simorgh Publications, a feminist initiative after the Hudood laws of 1979, Mahnoor Jalal on Paper magazine and Women’s Action Forum (WAF) newsletters, Karachi based Tazeen Hussain and  Veera Rustomji on Nukta Art and She magazine respectively. The talk was a window into the resourcefulness of Pakistan’s women, a time where women couldn’t turn to google, She founder Zuhra Kureishi published topics like how to change a flat tyre, or when local printers were controlled by the government, artist Lalarukh conducted printmaking workshops in her backyard.

KB24 rewarded close looking—the bees flying about the marigolds in Lina Persson of Sweden’s Marigold Entanglements, that appointed a legal status to the insects with official contracts on podiums, (in a theme relevant detail, Persson refrains from air travel due to her climate activism)or the mandala like patterns of grains and legumes amongst mismatched shoes of agricultural workers, in Eliana Otta’s Women’s Words; or acclaimed Tino Sehgal’s “constructed situations” which leave no physical residue: he forbids the creation of any of the by-products  that normally derive from a work (photographs, videos, catalogues, wall text) ⁷.

Work needed to be seen up close, many of the Biennale’s experiences didn’t photograph well (or in the case of Sehgal, photography was forbidden) and could not translate into social media, making KB24’s marketing often lost in the noise. CEO Niilofur Farrukh said the smaller scale of the Biennale was intentional and they tried ‘not to be seduced by grandness’, curtailing signage, and construction in their attempts to become an eco-biennale, an ambition since 2019. While commendable, you wished there were more instants of zooming out, less instructions and more spectacle.

“Why don’t you say it?” a young audience member asked panellists at the enlightening NED hybrid seminar on water, “why don’t you call out who is actually dirtying the river?”, suggesting naming textile giants and land developers. KB24 seemed to fumble when it navigated whispers and directness. Where work was instructional and, on the nose, like some of the video works, it was harder to engage. Monika Emmanuelle Kazi’s A Home Care—machine learning, while boldly questioning Swiss behemoth Nestle’s sugar-filled baby and infant products marketed to Global South nations (its European counterparts have no added sugars), felt unresolved.

Tino Sehgal’s presence at KB24 was a source of pride for the curator. He communicated via landline with Baloch and personally produced his Yet Untitled. On KB24’s opening weekend, Sehgal’s balletic performers were chanting and gliding along the floor of Frere Hall’s main gallery, (the hall looking vaster because Baloch had removed all structures). For a remarkable few moments, that will live on only in the mind, the light from the tall windows and Sadequain’s mural above seemed to join in with the voices, on that morning.

KB24 presented artists as educators, but where were artists as mediators? The ones providing an exit from the enclosure of cold data⁸? There were fewer points of lyricism in the biennale, like Luis Carlos Tovar’s ‘The Coal Portraits’ fluttering from the windows of Frere Hall, Imran Ahmed Khan’s tandoors (clay ovens) which if you put your ear to, had beautiful music, poetry and audio in 4 languages, celebrating the special communion of sharing food.

Bita’s Dowry featured photographs of objects collected by artist Bita Razavi’s grandmother for her marriage. Objects like a sewing machine, and dolphin shaped bottle opener were purchased during the Iran-Iraq war. They didn’t have food, the artist recalls, “She cut her stomach for me.”  With Razavi moving to Finland and never having use for a dowry, the collection embodied shifting social systems. The work resonates as more people are leaving the crystal bowls and trays behind for Europe and the Gulf: last year over 832,000 Pakistanis left the country, the highest emigration since 2016⁹.

Lundahl and Sietl’s River biographies, winner of the KB24 Performance Art Prize, was one of KB24’s most captivating. Blinded by headsets, 20 participants explore embodiments of stone and water to form a river collectively. With mysterious hands and whispered instructions on earphones guiding you, there is a feeling of spluttering down valleys and waterways like a tadpole.

The sensory deprivation of vision challenges our ocular-dominated society¹⁰, as one participant said, if I’m water I won’t ever lose my way, but as a person it’s hard to take steps¹¹. It is in such moments that Rizq/Risk comes alive, it makes you think of kinship with the planet, or of a grandmother during a war, standing in line for food, worried only about your future dignity. Or that a grain of rice is nine months of work.

In the curatorial sub thematic, Riverine Resilience, artists like Qadir Jhatial’s Boat show us the void and pause— lodged in truckloads of sand from Sukkur, sprinkled with drawings of dead birds, the wooden boat has neither fisherman nor water. Nadeem Alkarimi’s “The Last Act”, winner of the KB24 Juried Art Prize, uses a language in which what is said ‘and what has been silenced gain meaning’¹². You view their video inside a dome decorated with clouds and a fox made mostly from chip packets. The packaging labels speak to the materials’ lives as commodities of a mighty global industry, as well as their role in conflicts. Hailing from the Northern Hunza Valley, the artist was struck by a fox separated from her cubs due to construction and tree culling for a resort. Al Karimi’s devastating film asks, is “rizq meant solely for human consumption? Does it really equate to extracting as many resources from the Earth as possible?” With characters whose rhythms are in symbiosis with the Valley, it is a pained lyric to an avaricious world.

What should a Biennale be? “Whatever you want it to be” Niilofur Farrukh answered in 2017¹³, invoking Okwui Enwezor. When the first Biennale opened it was triumphant and welcome; Pakistan’s largest contemporary art event prevailed despite funding and logistical battles, and the violence of Karachi’s ‘na maloom afraad’.  The biennale’s fourth iteration opened more quietly, amidst uncertainty spreading beyond the Arabian sea.  With Pakistan facing setbacks on many fronts (Farrukh called it one of the darkest times) the Gaza war growing, and (at the time) US election results awaited, there was a disillusionment and heaviness. Waheeda Baloch says her work “is serious” and KB24 mostly was. Although its tagline was ‘Nai fasal ki umeed’ (in the hope of a new harvest), it made you uneasy and alert. What should a Biennale be? In KB24’s case, it was a mirror for Pakistan’s troubled heart, searching for hope in a ‘crowded out and silenced’¹⁴space.

KB24, The Fourth Karachi Biennale, curated by Waheeda Baloch under the theme, Rizq | Risk, was held at 5 venues from October 27 to November 10, 2024.

Title image: Nadeem Alkarimi. The Last Act Film. Dismantling Life. Installation. Discarded commercial food packaging. PC: KB24. Photographer: Humayun Memon